AMD today demonstrated its ongoing support for high performance computing by providing massive compute capability, performance and flexibility for the world's number one ranked supercomputer. This ranking, the sixth number-one spot for AMD-based supercomputers in the last five years, highlights AMD's commitment to enabling indispensable computing technology by offering competitive performance at low cost.

The top supercomputer, a Cray XK7 nicknamed "Titan" and containing more than 18,000 AMD Opteron processors, was cited in the latest list of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites and is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL).

"AMD's impressive results in the latest edition of this prominent list underscore our strong focus on creating industry-leading technologies that allow our customers to capture and analyze massive amounts of data for areas of science that will ultimately shape our future," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Server Business Unit. "Through employment of our technology, partners like ORNL allow AMD the opportunity to play a role in how some of the biggest challenges of our time are addressed."

The semi-annual Top500 Supercomputing Sites list coincides with this week's SC12 event in Salt Lake City where AMD's leadership in supporting its technology partners and developing its ecosystem is echoed in the more than 20 technology demonstrations. Visitors to the AMD booth (#2019) will have the opportunity to see AMD-based systems that integrate technologies from nearly 30 independent software and hardware partners, as well as key industry partners such as Appro, Colfax, Cray, Dell, HP, Penguin, and Supermicro. Systems employing AMD FirePro graphics, AMD A-Series accelerated processing units (APUs) and AMD SeaMicro technologies will also be featured. The array of technologies presented in the booth emphasizes AMD's capabilities in addressing a range of workloads such as HPC cloud, big data and virtualization.

The Top500 ranking also comes on the heels of the launch of the AMD Opteron 6300 Series processor, which is also featured in AMD's SC12 booth. This latest addition to the AMD Opteron family delivers superior performance and scalability for HPC systems. AMD has enhanced the performance of the AMD Opteron 6300 Series for HPC customers by leveraging optimizations in compilers and libraries and combining them with the next-generation core architecture.

About Cray's "Titan" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The DOE's ORNL supercomputer contains 18,688 nodes, each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor, for a total of almost 300,000 cores at 20 petaFLOPS. "Titan" is 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, "Jaguar," which was announced in June 2010 and is also powered by AMD Opteron technology.

Titan is an upgraded Cray Jaguar super computer so i find it no strange they opt for AMD processor in the first place. but i do find this to be funny lol:

Incidentally, the Opteron processors used in the system are dual-chip CPUs based on the Bulldozer microarchitecture. We asked Sumit Gupta, General Manager for Tesla Accelerated Computing at Nvidia, why those CPU were chosen for this project, given the Xeon's current dominance in the HPC space. Gupta offered an interesting insight into the decision. He told us the contracts for Titan were signed between two and three years ago, and "back then, Bulldozer looked pretty darn good."